How to Become an Electrician with Your Own Business

If you’re a qualified and experienced electrician, you’ll know that your services are in constant demand. So, if you’ve had enough of working for someone else, why not start your own business? Becoming a self-employed electrician can increase your job satisfaction, as well as your earning potential.

Electrician jobs

The jobs that an electrician is responsible for are very varied with no two days being the same. If you choose to start your own business as a ‘one-man-band', then your day to day tasks will be much the same as an employed electrician. These typically include:

If however, you’d like to grow your business by taking on employees, you’ll also be responsible for a whole host of additional jobs, such as:

• Ensure that employees are adequately trained with the appropriate tools to perform their job. • Make sure that working conditions are safe. • Pay wages and any other entitled benefits. • Manage employees effectively, including holiday entitlement, sick leave, productivity issues etc.

As a business owner, you’ll also have to perform other business-related tasks such as marketing, dealing with customer quotes and queries, sorting out insurance and other compulsory requirements.

Electrician training

As a minimum, you’ll need to gain an industry recognised level 3 qualification such as a level 3 diploma in electro-technical services. The most popular route into this career is via an apprenticeship which takes between two and four years to become fully qualified.

To start your own electrical services business, it's essential that you have the required qualifications. However, if you have no previous experience as an electrician and fancy a change of career while owning your own business, there are many franchise opportunities that you could consider.

With franchises such as Mr. Electric and Mr. Handyman, you'd take on more of a managerial role. You wouldn't need to have worked as an electrician before as you’d be responsible for finding customers and then assigning a qualified tradesperson to the job.

Electrician salary

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), electricians earn more than any other trade receiving an average salary of £30,765. This increases to around £47,265 for the most skilled and experienced electricians.

Of course, these figures are based on employed electricians’ wages. If you choose to start your own business, you’ll be in control of setting your own rates. You get to decide if you charge per day, per hour or per job.

Knowing how much to charge your customers so that you’re making a profit while remaining competitive can be tough. One of the many benefits of becoming a franchisee as part of an electrical services business is that the franchisor will determine your rates. This allows you to price jobs more confidently and gives you a more accurate idea of how much you can earn.

How to become an electrician with your own business

Here are some tips to help you run your own business as a successful electrician.

Create your brand

When a customer lets you into their home or business, they want to be confident that they can trust you. If you come across polite, professional and knowledgeable, your customers will have more faith in your ability to do the job at hand. A well-designed logo, a smart uniform, branded transport and a good website can all go a long way to helping win customers over.

Choose reliable suppliers

When you’re starting a new business, it can be tempting to save money by choosing a cheap supplier. While it's essential that you make a profit, it's also critical that you provide your customers with an excellent, long-lasting service. This is particularly key as an electrician as low-cost products may be a risk that isn’t worth taking. If you offer a good service, with quality products, your customers will spread the word resulting in more business, so the additional cost is justified in the long run.

Protect your business

Even the most conscientious of electricians make mistakes. No matter how many precautions you take, accidents can and do happen. When you run your own business, a single mistake can be financially crippling so getting the right insurance in place is paramount.

Find customers

It doesn’t matter how skilled or qualified you are, your business can’t survive without customers. To ensure that you have enough work to make a profit, you’ll need to invest time and money into attracting new customers.

You could start small with ads in the local paper and shop windows, but sooner rather than later you should develop an online presence. Digital marketing is a relatively low-cost and highly effective way to spread the word about your business. If you're unsure of how to create a digital marketing campaign, there are lots of free content and courses online to guide you through it.

Once you’ve become more established and built up a decent customer base, then the power of word-of-mouth will play a huge part in gaining more customers. When it comes to tradespeople, referrals from family and friends are taken into account more than any other type of marketing.

Conclusion

Starting your own business as an electrician is both challenging and rewarding. To bypass many of the difficulties of becoming the boss, you could consider buying into a franchise. This will reduce the size of the mountain you have to climb as you won’t have to worry about marketing, branding, and training. All you'll need to do is fund the cost of purchasing the franchise, and the franchisor and their support team will help you to run an effective and profitable business.